TFT screen menu - pixel aid tool ?

[trastikata]

Hello all,

I have a hobby project with lot's of menus and buttons on a TFT screen. But I am calculating the coordinates for all buttons and menus manually. However buttons have filling colors and border shades which makes calculating all those position by hand quite tiresome.

I was thinking of creating a VB.net tool that will:
- create an arbitrary matrix of X * Y small squares representing pixels
- origin can be set in any of the 4 corners
- each square (pixel) can be colored from a standard color palette
- hoovering over a square (pixel) will display its coordinates from the origin

But before I start, I was thinking that maybe such or similar tool already exists and I don't have to reinvent the wheel?

Thanks

[JohnB]

This is a project I started quite a few years ago which might be of interest. It was my attempt to produce a GUI development environment. I stopped at the point of generating code for the TFT.  All the object constructs are contained in each screen file, its a matter of writing code for individual tft screens.  Perhaps now with Atomix's library this project might be worth resurrecting.

Extract the attached to a new directory, run the exe and open the sample project.  It should work, does on my machine but it is very old code as you can tell by the date.

[Dompie]

@JohnB the download link gives a "File not found" error.

Johan

[trastikata]

This is a project I started quite a few years ago which might be of interest...

Sounds like something I can use, unfortunately the link doesn't work.

P.s. It's only the coordinates for each box or menu or text on a complex screen which I can first draw and then create the code for it with my own graphic library.

[JohnB]

Here's a link which should work

[Teo]

Hi John,
Does the GUI development environment work?
Does help work?
I tried to do something and.... maybe I'm wrong.
Thanks in advance,
Teo

[JohnB]

Assuming  you have run TFT Designer, go to File, Open Project, Navigate to the folder in which you placed TFT Designer and open the project file "MyTestProject.proj" 

If that worked then you will see a screen representing the TFT, holding some objects, a check box, Image, Radio button and line. You can drag these object around and resize them.

In the lower lefthand panel is an object inspector which holds the properties of the active object. You can change these properties and they will be reflected in the screen.

The upper right hand panel contains a list of all the TFT screens in the project. If you right click on items in the list you can add and remove screens.

In the lower panel is a palette of objects which can be added to the tft screen. Click on an item on the palette and click on the TFT screen to add the object to the screen.

This app is a project which I started but abandoned when it became clear I was not going to get much support for creating the TFT code, hence no help file and loads of features one might like if it was to be taken to a full product.  To find out more you will have to play with what you have

[JohnB]

I noticed that the images controls should contain images, the data is in the screen files but for some reason its not being loaded on the TFT screen.  As I said before its an old project which will require work if its to be usable, I just put it out there because @trastikata had asked about something a bit similar.

If you look at the screen files they are plain text structures a little like xml files so they would be easy to process and generate code for the TFT from this basic information.